FeatherTrailMD (ft)

A blazing-fast, filesystem-first notes assistant built in Go.

Overview

FeatherTrailMD (ft) is a markdown-based notes engine that organizes your notes cleanly into daily folders (YYYY-MM-DD). It uses simple commands to create, list, read, and append to your notes without any bloated databases or reliance on closed ecosystems.

Installation

The easiest way to install FeatherTrailMD is via the go toolchain:

go install github.com/nickpricks/ft/cmd/feathertrailmd@latest

(Note: The entry point was renamed from cmd/ft to cmd/feathertrailmd to adhere to Go standard layout while preventing .gitignore conflicts with the compiled ft binary.)

Alternatively, you can run the provided installer scripts (install.ps1 for Windows, install.sh for macOS/Linux).

Usage

First Run

When you run ft for the very first time, it will ask you where you'd like to store your Markdown notes globally:

Welcome to FeatherTrailMD!
It looks like this is your first time running the tool.
Where would you like to store your notes? [~/Documents/FeatherTrailNotes]:

Once configured, ft will save this path to ~/.fmd.json, allowing you to take notes from any directory on your computer!

Commands

ft is very straightforward to use:

• Create a note: ft add "My note text here"
• List notes: ft list
• Read a note: ft read 01
• Append to a note: ft edit 01 "Appending some extra information"

Extending & Development

See the docs/ folder for more information:

• docs/man.md - Developer manual and codebase execution flow.
• docs/ref.md - Quick reference to the codebase and constants.
• docs/ActualPlan.md - Current project roadmap and progression state.

Roadmap & Vision

FeatherTrailMD is designed to naturally evolve from a simple CLI note tool into a comprehensive Markdown ecosystem.

• Phase 1: Minimal CLI Notes Engine (✅ Completed): Core filesystem logic (internal/core), add, list, read, and edit commands with incremental day-based ID generation.
• Phase 2: Metadata & Frontmatter (🔜 Next Up): Custom line-by-line frontmatter parser to inject metadata and enable filtering via list --status, --tag, and --date.
• Phase 3: Markdown Parser: Custom Markdown parsing engine (Tokenizer, AST, HTML rendering).
• Phase 4: Advanced AST Editing: Intelligent content modification based on the AST (e.g. edit --after).
• Phase 5: mdcore Library: Extracting the formal parser into a reusable Go package.
• Phase 6: Static Site Generator: Converting notes into a blog with Go templates.
• Phase 7: Multi-Deploy Targets: Deploying directly to GitHub Pages, Cloudflare, etc.
• Phase 8: Export & Extensions: Exports (PDF, ePub) and advanced features (AI summaries, Graph views).